1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to mobile devices, and, more specifically, to synchronization of native PIM data with mobile applications.
2. Description of the Background Art
Mobile devices, such as cellular telephones, have evolved into personal organizers holding all manner of information, including contact information, events, tasks, and related functionality. Often, these devices will come equipped with integrated software to provide this functionality, such as e-mail and calendaring applications.
Being designed by, or in cooperation with, the mobile device manufacturer, these integrated software applications are able to leverage the mobile device's Personal Information Management (“PIM”) functions in order to store information such as contacts and calendar events. In an effort to allow other developers to expand the capabilities of their mobile device, the mobile device manufacturer will also generally provide an application programming interface (“API”) to the PIM store for developers to interact with the locally stored data.
Access to the PIM store allows third party applications to, for example, provide additional views of data stored on the mobile device. For example, a mapping application may be able to take contact information stored in the PIM and use it to create a route to the contact's location. The difficulty of this is, however, that the application developer must follow the access conventions stipulated by the mobile device's particular PIM API. These APIs are by no means standardized, and different mobile devices even provide different data storage capabilities.
As a result, the software development process involving PIM data mobile devices is slowed. Additionally, there is no effective way to synchronize data in a local PIM store across an enterprise without purpose-built software.
Accordingly, what is desired is PIM integration for mobile applications.